his flock.  In the thick of the slaughter, while baptizing and absolving the dying, he was smitten down with three bullet wounds and his cassock torn from his body.  As he lay in agony the moans of a wounded Petun near by drew his attention.  Though spent with loss of blood, though his brain reeled with the weakness of approaching death, he dragged himself to his wounded red brother, gave him absolution, and then fell to the ground in a faint.  On recovering from his swoon he saw another dying convert near by and strove to reach his side, but an Iroquois rushed upon him and ended his life with a tomahawk.

In a sense Chabanel was less fortunate than Garnier.  On the day following the massacre of St Jean he was hastening along the well-beaten trail towards Ste Marie, when the sound of Iroquois war-cries in the distance alarmed his guides, and all deserted him save one.  This one did worse, for he slew the priest and cast his body into the Nottawasaga river.  This murderer, an apostate Huron, afterwards confessed the crime, declaring that he had committed it because nothing but misfortune had befallen him ever since he and his family had embraced Christianity.

For some months after the death of Garnier and Chabanel the Jesuits maintained the mission of St Mathias among the Petuns in the Blue Hills.  Here Father Adrien Greslon laboured until January 1650, and Father Leonard Garreau until the following spring.  Garreau was then recalled, leaving not a missionary on the mainland in the Huron or the Petun country.

The French and Indians on Isle St Joseph, though safe from attack, were really prisoners on the island.  Mohawks and Senecas remained in the forests near by, ready to pounce on any who ventured to the mainland.  When winter bridged with ice the channel between the island and the main shore, it was necessary for the soldiers of the mission to stand incessantly on guard.  And now another enemy than the Iroquois stalked among the fugitives.  The fathers had abundant food for themselves and their assistants; but the Hurons, in their hurried flight, had made no provision for the winter.  The famishing hordes subsisted on acorns and roots, and even greedily devoured the dead bodies of dogs and foxes.  Disease joined forces with famine, and by spring fully half the Hurons at Ste Marie had perished.  Some fishing and hunting parties left the island in search of food, but few returned.

It soon appeared that for the Hurons to remain on the island meant extinction.  Two of the leading chiefs waited on Father Ragueneau and begged him to move the remnant of their people to Quebec, where under the sheltering walls of the fortress they might keep together as a people.  It was a bitter draught for the Jesuits; but there was no other course.  They made ready for the migration; and on the 10th of June (1650) the thirteen priests and four lay brothers of the mission, with their donnes, hired men, and soldiers, in all sixty French, and about three hundred Hurons, entered canoes and headed for the French River.  On their way down the Ottawa they met Father Bressani, who had gone to Quebec in the previous autumn for supplies, and who now joined the retreating party.  And on the 28th of July, after a journey of fifty days, all arrived safely at the capital of New France.